Capitalist Note: This post is part of a series on Building/Reinforcing Company Culture Through Great Recruiting and Talent Acquisition Practices.

Let's face it people, "company culture" is a loaded phrase. Some of it is real, some of it is aspirational, but one thing on my mind recently is that as we try to build the culture we want at our companies, we forget about the messages we send in our recruiting process.

So you're proud of your culture - cool! Let's dig in and see if you're reinforcing that culture in all the gritty details of your talent acquisition/recruiting process. Remember - if your TA/Recruiting process doesn't match and promote your culture, you're not going to get the fit/matches you need in the candidate marketplace.

------------------------

HR and recruiting leaders love assessment platforms. There's a good reason for that - it's incredibly hard to hire the right person for a specific job/company, and the right assessment platform can neutralize challenges in the interviewing skills of hiring managers and help you make the right selection decision. In addition, assessment platforms unlock the talent geek in all of us - we're fascinated by the science and validity of these tools.

Properly used, the right assessment platform can also help you build/reinforce company culture. But too often we onboard assessment tools that are poor fits for our company culture or send candidates mixed messages about what's most important to our company. The result is we miss on top talent because we're focused on the wrong things.

Good news - there's a simple roadmap to follow if you want to use assessment platforms to identify top talent and drive culture, all while ensuring your organization has the diversity necessary to meet business challenges.

1--When selecting a Behavioral Assessment platform to use in your recruiting process, size matters. It's easy to get lost in the science of behavioral assessments and want it all. With hundreds of providers competing for your attention, the result is bloat, as measured by how long it takes a candidate to complete the assessment (too long) and the size of the output report back to your recruiters/hiring managers (too many pages).

Select an assessment platform that's light in both of these measurements. Simple things get used, complex things don't. An assessment platform that takes more than 20-25 minutes to complete is net negative to how a candidate views your culture, and any assessment report that can't be summarize a candidate to a hiring manager in a single page is unlikely to be used in a meaningful way.

Size matters. Be OK picking an assessment platform that provides 90% of the value in 50% of the time.

Many assessment platforms sell the ability to give you a pass/fail, hire/don't hire answer on candidate selection. While this feature of certain assessment platforms is attractive, resist the urge to deploy this type of solution. The reality of selection in your company is much more nuanced than a hire/don't hire assessment solution can provide.

Deploying an assessment platform to assist in building/reinforcing culture is more complex. The reality is that hire/don't hire recommendations will only be available for specific jobs, and to truly use assessments for building/reinforcing culture, you'll want to use them for every job in your company. In addition, pass/fail designations rob your company of candidates who provide behavioral and situational diversity, whereas viewing each candidate profile across a variety of dimensions allows you to make tradeoffs and hire candidates who might have been rejected - with the expectation they'll need to be coached in certain areas

If you're building a great culture, it's likely you'll be committed to building a culture of coaching and feedback. There's no better example of this than looking at a team of 8-10 people across the assessment dimensions you use (recommend no more than 8 dimensions for simplicity) and seeing differences as well as similarities. Behavioral diversity matters, and you can't accomplish it with platforms that sell pass/fail.

3--The modern world of work mandates some behavioral categories are more important than others.

"Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in awhile, you could miss it."

That iconic quote from Ferris Bueller's Day Off underscores what everyone reading this understands - in today's business world, speed matters. There are few environments left where change doesn't occur on a daily basis. 5-year strategic plans have been replaced with a quarterly, if not monthly, focus.

As a result, some behavioral dimensions are more important than others to provide cultural and business fit. To find cultural fit in the world of change that likely exists in your company, we recommend use of a solution that includes a cognitive element (helps you measure the ability to take in large amounts of data and make quick, accurate decisions) as well as rules orientation (measures comfort in unstructured, chaotic environments).

Add in dimensions like Detail Orientation and Sensitivity (both help measure ability to execute), and you've got a playbook for a candidate who can thrive in a culture of high change.

4--Post-hire use of your behavioral assessment platform is key in developing a culture focused on employee development.

To truly unlock the ability to use assessment platforms to build and reinforce culture, you'll need to ensure that they're used after you've made your hiring decision. This requires partnership and collaboration between Talent Acquisition/Recruiting and the rest of the HR function.

First up - repurpose your assessment used in selection as an onboarding tool. Train your managers on how to run a session to share the assessment results with each new employee, describing what each dimension means and where the onboarding employee falls in those dimensions. Turn this 1/1 session into an introduction to coaching in your company culture by having the manager share "two strengths" (dimensions that will help the employee do great things) and "two opportunities" (dimensions that might trip up the employee from time to time if awareness is not high).

This 1/1 session sets the stage for future coaching and unlocks the potential of the recruiting assessment to maximize the company culture you're building moving forward.

Your employees are often your company’s best storytellers. The question is: What kinds of stories do they have that are worth telling? Want tips and strategies you can use to motivate your staffers? Find it here: :www.peoplehum.com/#bl